I went into Ashen with certain expectations. Not of quality, but of mood. It sets out its Dark Soulsbut stall right away, with talk of disasters and darkness and god-level menaces, and so I shifted my brain into the familiar gears of isolation and doomy solitude. These, experience has taught, are lonely adventures in hostile places – only the broken corpses will ever witness my…

﻿ Look out. The year 2018 is going down in a storm. There are hundreds of games aboard, running, jumping, trying their best to survive the maelstrom. But there’s only one tiny lifeboat, and only enough room for three games. It falls on the sorry shoulders of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, to decide which trio of games clamber onto the life raft…

In most video games, you’re the hero. You might be the foretold chosen one or of more humble means, but in any case, the game still revolves around your agency and impact on the world. This fantasy falls apart quickly in multiplayer games, where if everyone is the hero, then surely no one is. Ashen might have the solution to this. Join a friend or…

As we stare into the weary, craggy face of the final quarter of 2018, there is still a glimmer of hope. The games are not yet done. They will never be done. And the impending release of them, some close, some a little further away, stirs something within us. The delicate, easily crushed butterfly of excitement. We may catch it yet, to keep in our…

The festival of dumb explosions known as E3 is over, but that won’t stop us. The RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, goes deep into the show, picking out our favourite games, the oddest moments, and best rats (spoiler: it was the one crushed by a shelf in the Resident Evil 2 trailer). We’re also introducing two new voices this week. Who are these strange…

During this year’s E3, I saw the largest screen I’d ever witnessed, folded around the corner of a building like a giant piece of glowing paper. It told me to buy Nike. LA is already the neon futuretown of California, never mind Night City. But I didn’t just see ads for shoes at the LA convention centre, I saw a lot of games too. From…

As we lay 2017 to rest, let us remember all of the wonderful games that flickered across our screens and occupied our hearts and minds. But now we must promise never to think of them again because times have changed. This is 2018 and if we've learned one thing from the few hours we've spent in it it's that there are games everywhere. Every firework…